Passover a time to seek freedom from folly, fear
The story of Passover, which began Monday night, is freedom. It is the ancient, hoary tale of the flight of the Jews in Egypt, into the desert, after God brought devastation and death upon their captors.
Passover is about exodus. It is about liberty — that natural, enduring, instinct-shaping human history.
“We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord, our God, brought us forth from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,” says the Haggadah, which is recited at the Seder on the eve of Passover. “And if the Holy One … had not brought our forefathers out of Egypt, then even we, our children, and our children's children, would still be in bondage to Pharoah in Egypt.”
Pharaoh was a slow learner. To break his will, God imposed 10 plagues on the Egyptians. These included blood, frogs, vermin, boils, pestilence, hail, locusts and darkness.
With each plague, Pharaoh remained headstrong and unrelenting. While it is hard to compare the severity of one plague against another — is bathing in a sea of blood worse than an infestation of boils? — they were divine retribution, a form of escalating violence.
The 10th plague was the slaying of the firstborn of the Egyptians. Facing this horrible judgment, Pharoah agreed, then changed his mind.
We know what happened next: his legions chased the Jews across the desert, to the Red Sea, where the waters parted and opened a corridor to safe passage. When the Egyptians followed in hot pursuit, the sea returned, swallowing them all.
The Jews had their freedom, but freedom for what? Freedom to wander in the desert? Freedom to worship idols? Freedom to find their way, one day, to the Promised Land?
Then, and now, the story of the Jews is the search for freedom to follow their faith and worship their God.
For much of their history, they have never enjoyed freedom from fear. In fact, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust and beyond, they have found hatred.
On this Passover, Jews face a new order of antisemitism, from college campuses to literary festivals. That has never gone away, of course, but the sadness of this Passover is understanding what the last six months of war in Gaza has wrought. Call it a Passover reckoning.
Freedom today? For Jews it begins with freedom for the hostages, whom the government of Israel has largely abandoned. Freedom for dispossessed Israelis in kibbutzim and towns in southern and northern Israel, who are homeless. Freedom from grief for the families of those kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed, who will never recover from the barbarity of October 7.
But freedom means more. It is freedom for Israelis from the incompetence of their politicians and analysts, who misread the warnings before the attacks. It is freedom from the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, whom most Israelis now revile.
Freedom from Netanyahu's promise that Hamas would be destroyed and today's canard that it can be. Freedom from the staining of Israel's reputation, which will take a generation to restore.
Freedom from the trap of Gaza. How? As Senator George Aiken said of the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s: “Let's declare victory and get out!”
But freedom is not just for the Jews. Let us wish freedom for Gazans from a Hamas regime that uses them as shields and that found money for tunnels and weapons rather than clinics and schools. Freedom from paralyzing grief for thousands of their dead children, who are no less innocent than Israeli children.
Freedom? It means different things to different people.
In America, it means freedom from the vanity of Donald Trump and in Ukraine from the cruelty of Vladimir Putin. In Burma, it means freedom from the junta (whose mounting reversals in that civil war offers rare good news these days.) In Germany, it means freedom from the rise of the far right, as it does elsewhere in Europe.
Everywhere, this Passover, in this world, we seek freedom from folly, anger, ignorance, war, hunger, global warming. We seek freedom from small minds and cold hearts. We will seek it next year, too.